I have a LG GSA-54L for a long time, maybe one year.When I bought it, I tested all available media I could find, it performed very well (CD, DVD, rewritable, lightscribe, dual layer etc).

I have a box of 50 Imation CD blanks, and I used about 25% of it in the first month without problems.

After that, I started to use just one CD-RW and one DVD-RW, which was enough for its purpose. Again, everything went well.

A few days ago, I tried to burn a CD-R with some music for my car. Nero complained that it failed to write. I tried 3 more blanks from the same box, all failed (but the disc doesn't look like it has anything written on it, and Nero always tells me that those discs are empty).

I ignored this issue until i needed to write a Windows XP iso with some injected drivers. Again, write failed on CD-R, write successfull on CD-RW. Ok, now I'm worried. Things I've already tried without success:

various brands of CD-R and DVD-R -> all of them fail to write, from the very beginning of the operation

various writing software: Nero, nLite, Windows XP native mode etc. -> all of them write on CD-RW/DVD-RW, but they fail to write on CD-R/DVD-R

Windows complete reinstallation (not repair) - problem persists

firmware upgrade to 1.02 (drive was 1.01) - problem persists

firmware downgrade again to 1.01 - problem persists

GSA-H55L 1.02 firmware -> problem persists

I'm out of ideas. I don't have another computer available at this time, so I can't take the drive out and put it in another computer or operating system.